1950s - The Myth of Suburbia

My experience of growing up in the 1950s in a suburb of Vancouver, Canada strayed from the typical family life that magazines and ads wanted people to believe. My parents were divorced when I was a toddler and my mother moved into a house in a typical suburban neighborhood of Vancouver as a single parent with two toddlers. She definitely stood out and I was teased by other children in the neighborhood because I didn’t have a dad. Things definitely are so different nowadays with so many one parent families, same sex parents, and even grandparents raising their grandchildren as an example. Back in the 1950s though, that wasn’t the case, and my family stood out on that quiet tree-lined street.

I used to be so envious of friends and classmates having a ‘normal’ family with both mother and father and living the ‘surburban dream’. In reality though, I learned later that things were not what they seemed. Some of those perfect families had a far from perfect happy home life. One friend’s mother had a serious problem with an eating disorder, one friend’s father was an angry man who drank too much and was physically abusive and the list goes on. At the time though, appearances were everything and the dad would be out there mowing the perfect lawn on a Saturday morning and the mother would be in the house, cooking and cleaning. That’s what I saw and I was envious of my friends as my mother and my life was so different.

With no dad around it fell to my mother to take care of the lawn and home repairs although to be honest it seems my grandfather would come over to help her and do most of that. My mother had a difficult time being a single parent in such an environment and as such, was very unhappy and had trouble coping. In retrospect, I often wonder how much happier she would have been if she had been living in an environment where she was accepted and not made to feel different.

I love the 1950s but sometimes I do think about the darker side of that era and what it was like for people like my mother.